All things cloud are certain to be important topics next week in the VMworld user seminar, but VMware took things up a notch with plans to spend $4.2 billion to obtain cloud-development company Pivotal, and security provider Carbon Black.
Throughout its quarterly fiscal call VMware said it would spend about $2.7 billion on Pivotal and its own Cloud Foundry hybrid cloud development technology and yet another $2.1 billion for Carbon Black, which comprises its Predictive Security Cloud offering along with other endpoint-security software.
VMware had profound relationships with both companies. Carbon Black technology a part of VMware’s AppDefense end point security product. Pivotal has a deeper relationship from that VMware and Dell, VMware’s parent company spun out Pivotal in 2013.
“These acquisitions address two critical technology priorities of all businesses now — building modern, enterprise-grade protecting and applications enterprise workloads and customers. With these actions we meaningfully quicken our subscription and SaaS offerings and expand our ability to enable our clients’ digital transformation,” said VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger on the telephone.
With regards to this Pivotal acquisition Gelsinger said the time was right to own the whole compute stack. “We are now uniquely positioned to assist customers build, run and manage their cloud surroundings and clients can go one place to get all of this technology,” Gelsinger said. “We embed the technology in our center VMware platform, and we’ll explain more about that at VMworld next week.”
On the Carbon Black purchase, Gelsinger said he expects the technology to be incorporated across VMware’s families including NSX networking applications and vSphere, the company’s flagship virtualization platform. “Safety is broken and fundamentally, customers want a different answer in the security space. We think this move will be an opportunity for disruption.”
Patric Morley, president and CEO of Carbon Black wrote of the bargain :”VMware has a vision to create a modern security platform for virtually any program, running on almost any cloud, delivered to any device — essentially, to build security into the fabric of the compute heap. Carbon Black’s cloud-native platform, our capacity to see and stop attackers by leveraging the power of our abundant behavioral and data analytics, and our profound cybersecurity experience are all truly identifying”
VMware continues to be on a Huge buying spree this season that has included:
Avi Networks for multi-cloud application delivery solutions.
Bitfusion for hardware virtualization.
Uhana, a company that is employing deep real-time and learning AI in carrier networks and applications, to automate network operations and maximize application expertise.
Veriflow, for network affirmation, assurance and troubleshooting.
Heptio for its Kubernetes technology.
Kubernetes integration is going to be a big topic at VMworld, Gelsinger hinted. “You may hear quite specific statements about how Heptio is going to be used.”
Other updates about where VMware vSphere and NSX-T are headed will also be hot topics.
Introduced in 2017, NSX-T Data Center software is targeted at organizations looking to support multivendor cloud-native applications, bare-metal workloads, hypervisor environments along with the growing hybrid and multi-cloud worlds. In February the company anointed NSX-T as the company’s go-to platform for future software-defined cloud improvements.
VMware is combating Cisco with its Program Centric Infrastructure, Juniper using its Contrail system along with many others like Pluribus, Arista and Big Switch, and how NSX-T evolves will be key to this competition.
The most recent news about vSphere was that VMware customers are now able to migrate non-vSphere, in addition to increased amounts of on-premises application workloads, to a variety of cloud services with a brand new release of the company’s Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) application-mobility computer software. Introduced in 2017, VMware HCX lets vSphere clients tie together on-premises programs and applications with a number of cloud solutions.
The HCX announcement was a part of VMware’s continuing evolution to cloud technologies. In July the company teamed with Google to natively support VMware workloads in its Google Cloud service, providing customers more choices for deploying enterprise applications.
Further news about that connection is likely at VMworld too.
VMware also includes a hybrid cloud partnership with Microsoft’s Azure cloud service. That package, known as Azure VMware Solutions, that can be built on VMware Cloud Foundation, a package of the company’s traditional compute-virtualization software vSphere with NSX network virtualization and VSAN software-defined storage area network product. The company is expected to update developments with that platform too.
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